Ten Con Artists Who Pulled Off the Impossible

Charles Ponzi's idea started with a real loophole. International postal reply coupons could be bought cheaply in some countries and exchanged in the United States for stamps worth several times more. He set up an investment company in Boston and, by early 1920, was promising investors 50 percent returns in 45 days.

The arithmetic never worked. Nowhere near enough coupons existed to produce the profits he was paying, so early investors were paid with money from later ones. By the summer of 1920 he had taken in an estimated $15 million from thousands of people. He gained control of Boston's Hanover Trust Company and lived lavishly.

The Boston Post began digging, and in August 1920 it published reports questioning whether he could possibly pay what he owed. He was arrested on August 13, 1920. Several banks connected to him failed. He was sent to federal prison on mail fraud, then convicted on state charges in Massachusetts as well. After his release he was deported to Italy in 1934, and he died in a charity ward in Rio de Janeiro in January 1949. His name is now the standard term for this kind of fraud.

Born Elizabeth Bigley in Ontario in 1857, Cassie Chadwick reinvented herself several times before landing in Cleveland. There, in 1897, she married Leroy Chadwick, a wealthy doctor, and gained entry to the city's elite. Then came her masterpiece: she let it be known that she was the secret daughter of the steel magnate Andrew Carnegie.

The story was designed so that no banker would dare check it with Carnegie himself. She claimed Carnegie, out of guilt, had given her promissory notes worth millions and would leave her a fortune. She backed this up with documents bearing forged Carnegie signatures. Banks in Ohio and beyond lent her enormous sums against her supposed expectations, and she spent lavishly.

In 1904 a banker named Herbert Newton sued her for an unpaid loan, and the structure fell apart. Her borrowing helped bring down the Citizens National Bank of Oberlin. In March 1905 she was convicted of conspiracy against the United States and conspiring to wreck that bank. She was sentenced to more than ten years in prison and fined $70,000. She died in prison in 1907, about a year after she began serving her sentence.

Gregor MacGregor was a Scottish soldier who had genuinely fought in South America's wars of independence. In 1820 he arrived in London with a new title: Cazique, or prince, of Poyais, a supposedly fertile and developing nation on the Bay of Honduras, complete with a capital, a government and a currency.

None of it existed beyond a stretch of undeveloped coast. MacGregor marketed Poyais with a glowing guidebook, sold land to would-be settlers, and in 1822 floated a Poyais government loan of £200,000 in London. Ordinary people traded their savings for land certificates and Poyais banknotes.

In September 1822 the ship Honduras Packet sailed from London with about 70 colonists, and in January 1823 the Kennersley Castle left Leith with about 200 more. They found jungle, no town and no government. Disease swept through the camps, and accounts agree that most of the settlers died; fewer than 50 ever made it back to Britain. MacGregor moved his scheme to France, where authorities stopped a ship and arrested him. Tried in Paris in 1826, he was acquitted. He eventually returned to Venezuela, received a general's pension, and died there in 1845.

Ferdinand Waldo Demara never finished high school, but at various points he lived as a monk, a psychologist, a college instructor, a teacher, and a prison official. His most astonishing role came in 1951, when he joined the Royal Canadian Navy using the name and credentials of a real doctor, Joseph Cyr, whom he had befriended and whose papers he took.

Commissioned as a surgeon-lieutenant, Demara was posted to the destroyer HMCS Cayuga during the Korean War. When wounded men were brought aboard, he operated anyway, reportedly reading up on procedures and leaning on antibiotics. Accounts credit him with removing a bullet from one man's chest and amputating a foot, along with treating several other wounded men.

The publicity is what undid him. Press stories about the heroic ship's doctor reached Canada, and the real Dr. Cyr's circle quickly realized that someone was using his name. The navy investigated, discovered the deception, and discharged Demara rather than prosecute him. He kept impersonating people for years, served time for a fake teaching job, and became famous through Robert Crichton's 1959 book The Great Impostor, which was turned into a 1961 film starring Tony Curtis. Demara died in 1982.

In 1937 Abraham Bredius, one of the most respected Vermeer experts alive, declared that a newly surfaced painting, The Supper at Emmaus, was a Vermeer masterpiece. The Museum Boijmans in Rotterdam bought it for a fortune. The real painter was Han van Meegeren, a Dutch artist working under his own name in obscurity.

He had worked out how to beat the experts. Because oil paint takes decades to harden, he mixed his pigments with the synthetic resin Bakelite and baked the canvases until they hardened, and he reused old canvases to get authentic cracking. Over the following years he sold more fake Vermeers. One of them, Christ with the Woman Taken in Adultery, went to Hermann Goering in exchange for about 200 paintings the Nazis had seized.

After the war, investigators traced Goering's Vermeer to van Meegeren, and in May 1945 he was arrested for collaboration, selling a national treasure to the enemy. His defense was startling: he had painted it himself. To prove it, he painted another Vermeer, Jesus Among the Doctors, under guard. In November 1947 he was convicted of forgery and fraud and sentenced to one year in prison. He died of a heart attack the following month, before serving it.

In New York's art and hospitality world she was Anna Delvey, a German heiress with roughly 60 million euros waiting for her overseas. She lived in upscale hotels and pitched an ambitious private arts club in Manhattan. Her real name was Anna Sorokin, and the fortune did not exist.

Prosecutors said she used falsified bank records to apply for a loan of about $22 million to fund the club. That was turned down, but one bank lent her $100,000, which she did not repay. She also ran up bills at hotels and chartered a private jet to and from Omaha, Nebraska, without paying. Prosecutors put her total take at about $275,000.

She was arrested in October 2017. In April 2019 a Manhattan jury convicted her of grand larceny, attempted grand larceny, and theft of services, while acquitting her on two counts, including the charge that she tried to steal more than $1 million from one bank. In May 2019 Judge Diane Kiesel sentenced her to four to 12 years in prison. After her release she was held by immigration authorities over her visa status, later moved to house arrest and remained a minor celebrity.

For years, people in Boston knew him as Clark Rockefeller, an eccentric, well-read member of the famous family. He was nothing of the kind. Christian Gerhartsreiter was born in Germany in 1961 and came to the United States as a teenager in 1978 on a tourist visa. Over the next three decades he moved through a series of invented identities, including Christopher Chichester and Christopher Crowe, under which he landed jobs at Wall Street firms using a fake Social Security number.

As Clark Rockefeller he married Sandra Boss, a Harvard-educated business executive, in 1995. After the couple split, on July 27, 2008, during a court-supervised visit in Boston, he abducted his 7-year-old daughter and took her to Baltimore. He was arrested there on August 2, and she was unharmed. In June 2009 he was convicted of kidnapping and sentenced to up to five years.

The investigation into his real identity reopened an older case. In the 1980s, as Chris Chichester, he had lived in San Marino, California, near John and Linda Sohus, who vanished in 1985. Remains of John Sohus were found in 1994 buried at that property. Gerhartsreiter was charged in 2011, and on April 10, 2013, a California jury convicted him of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to 27 years to life.